Collin Sutton
Colorado School of Mines, CO·Earth & Environmental Science
Much of the water, heat and storage capacity we draw from underground travels not through solid rock but through the cracks running across it. As fluid moves along those fractures it reacts with the rock surfaces, changing its own chemistry and the rock's.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Engineering
Computer Science
- Topics
reactive transport
fractured rock
discrete fracture networks
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Develop a reduced-order, bipartite graph framework that captures the essential flow, solute transport and geochemical reactions in fractured rock without the cost of full-physics simulation.
- Characterize geochemical reactions between fluid and fractured rock using core analysis, geochemical sampling, tracer tests and electrical resistivity tomography data from the Sanford Underground Research Facility, supplemented by laboratory experiments.
- Refine and validate both high-fidelity discrete fracture network models and the graph-based reduced-order models against the field and laboratory results.
- Test whether the reduced-order approach enables rapid uncertainty quantification and site-specific predictions of reactive transport for applications such as carbon dioxide sequestration and geothermal reservoirs.
More about the research
Predicting those reactions at the scale of a real field site is difficult: fracture networks are geometrically messy, and simulations that resolve all the physics are too slow to run the many times needed to test uncertainty. This fellowship project attacks that bottleneck with a simplified modeling approach anchored in data from a deep underground laboratory.
Why it matters
Faster, trustworthy predictions of how fluids react with fractured rock would help in storing carbon dioxide and hydrogen underground, protecting groundwater quality, siting geothermal reservoirs, exploring for critical minerals, and managing aquifer recharge. Communities relying on subsurface water and energy resources stand to benefit from site-specific forecasts that come with honest estimates of uncertainty.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Liangping Li
South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, SD·Earth & Environmental Science
Model how hydraulic fractures spread during stimulation of deep rock, using Idaho National Laboratory's network flow-discrete element model and experiments at the Sanford Underground Research Facility.
George Bebis
University of Nevada-Reno, NV·Computer Science
Develop a physics-informed conditional generative deep learning framework that infers underground fracture network geometry and hydraulic properties from hydraulic and tracer tomography data.
Yashar Mehmani
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Engineering·Early-career
Map the regimes that determine whether volume-expanding mineral growth cracks porous rock open, exposing fresh reactive surface, or instead seals the pore space, using bench-scale experiments with microscale models coupling flow, reaction and fracture.
The school
Colorado School of Mines: 4 labs on PI Pages, $110M a year on research, 124 research doctorates a year.
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